“how we transform the physical object world and how this world in-turn, transforms us… The Lifestreams project by Proboscis forms a key feature of this exhibition, opening conversations about the role of the maker in developing objects that embody emotion and hold meaning without a superimposition through forces of branding and advertising. [T]his project engages the design community in questioning our role as makers of meaning and significance whilst keeping up with technologies and harnessing their powers for transformations extremely personal, weaving themselves into the narratives of everyday life.”

During the long process of sorting through our studio at Turnmill Street in preparation for the recent move, we began to assemble a collection of the print publications, multiples and other ephemera from many of our projects over the past 19 years. It is not an archive of everything we have made or published (it certainly excludes thousands of Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes created with bookleteer.com and its predecessors), but it is a pretty comprehensive collection of material outputs from many of the projects we have undertaken. It includes artefacts made by collaborators and commissioned artists – such as Andrew Hunter, Cathy Haynes & Sally O’Reilly, Neville Gabie, Rob Kesseler and Bob & Roberta Smith – as well as many things created over the years by members of Proboscis.

We have managed to put together five identical versions of this ‘Miscellany’ – one which we will keep as a reference set of our own; the other four we are donating to libraries/archives to make them publicly available to scholars and other artists (or anyone interested). This week the first collection will be delivered to the Special Collections Library at Chelsea College of Art & Design (University of the Arts London). We are also in discussion with the Banff Centre Library in Canada to donate another collection to their Artists Books Collection there. The third and fourth sets are intended to be donated to similar institution (to be confirmed) in Scotland (where Alice is from and where we spend considerable time each year) and Europe – where, as yet, we have not found a suitable home.

Over the summer we are planning to create a companion book (using bookleteer) that describes each of the components of the Miscellany. We will hand make copies of these to give to the libraries we are donating the collections to and make the book available as both downloadable PDF and as an online version to act as a guide.

During our open daysFriday 21st June and Saturday 22nd June between 12noon and 8pm we will also be selling some work from recent years including framed and unframed works on paper and textiles as well as publications including:

Many of the works will be available for purchase (details to come), including paintings and drawings by Alice Angus, a unique Large StoryCube set made for an exhibition about cyberneticist Gordon Pask, as well as many of our publications.

For those interested in signing up to our monthly participatory publishing project, the Periodical, there will be extra special gifts to take away for subscribing on the day. To find out more about subscribing see here.

We will also have lots of freebies to give away to reward those plucky enough to ascend the infamous stairs to our 4th floor garret!

Tony White’s latest novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South is published as an exclusive free ebook by the Science Museum, with an accompanying exhibition that runs until April 2014. Described by Marina Warner as ‘a bold novel-cum-manifesto, a prophecy, satire, and warning,’ Shackleton’s Man Goes South was inspired by – and explores the implications of – a forgotten science fiction short story warning of climate change that was written in Antarctica in 1911 by atmospheric scientist George Clarke Simpson. Flipping the polarity of the Shackleton myth, White tells a new story about Emily and her daughter Jenny, climate change refugees who are fleeing to Antarctica instead of from it, in a hot world rather than a cold one.

Alice & Giles invited Tony White to curate an informal studio event where some of these ideas could be explored further. White will be joined in Proboscis’s studio by two other authors: the artist and activist James Marriott of Platform, a London-based arts, human rights and environmental justice organisation, and performance artist Hayley Newman, who is committed to working collectively around the current economic and ecological crisis.

James Marriot is co-author with Mika Minio-Paluello of The Oil Road (Verso), an extraordinary book tracing the concealed routes from the oil fields of the Caspian Sea to the refineries and financial centres of Northern Europe. The Oil Road maps this ‘carbon web’, guiding the reader through a previously obscured landscape of energy production and consumption, resistance and profit.

Hayley Newman is the author of a new novella, Common (Copy Press), which chronicles one day of her self-appointed artist’s residency in the City of London. Taking us to crashes in global markets, turbulence in the Euro-zone and riots on hot summer nights, Common opens up the City through richly imaginative stories and empowering political actions.

Readings and discussion will be chaired by curator and interdisciplinary innovator Bronac Ferran.

“The visitors who told their stories are very proud of the work and the fact that they can see their work put to good use.” Cath Chesterton NEPACS

We were recently asked to create a set of 8 StoryCubes for Hidden Families (part of Royal Holloway University of London’s Families Disconnected by Prison project), to be used by Royal Holloway and partners such as Action for Prisoners Families, NEPACS and in training, talking about and raising awareness of the issues faced by families with a relative in prison.

We selected 48 of the images, originally created for the Hidden Families quilt, around the six key themes that had emerged – family, journey, time, finance, loneliness and support. Using a combination of participants’ photos, words and sketches with my illustrations, we created a block of 8 cubes that brings together some of people’s memories, comments and experiences.

Lizzie Coles-Kemp project lead said; “The focus of this project was to create a call to action by collecting the voices of families separated by prison and using different techniques to present the collective narrative. StoryCubes help us to develop the call to action by making the collective narrative interactive and providing another means for adding to and developing the story of this particular community. They make interactive and tactile objects from the textile quilt which are even more accessible to families, policy makers, practitioners and academics alike.”

NEPACS and Action for Prisoners Families will be using the cubes at training events and conferences, raising awareness of the impact of prison sentences on families.

A delivery of digitally printed fabric arrived this morning with the work for the Hidden Families project and for my mermaids and monsters work. I’ll be spending the next few days sewing up the quilts for Hidden Families partners.

In the last few months I’ve been working on Hidden Families, a project with families with someone in prison. The project, run by by Lizzie Coles Kemp of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London, was trying to find out how to improve the way information is made available to families, because people sometimes don’t or can’t engage with support services. The hardships families experience are diverse;- travel, costs of visiting, the huge distances to visit,the stress of uncertain weather and travel conditions that might cause someone to be late and miss their visit, bringing children, access to pension, welfare and benefits advice, sentence planning, prisoner safety and welfare, being stigmatised and outcast, and not expecting help or having the ability to improve the situation.

The project has several facets and I was involved in working with Action for Prisoners Families,NEPACS (who provide support services for families separated by prison), performer Freya Stang and visitors to a visitors’ center in a Category A prison.
Action for Prisoners’ Families (APF),

works for the benefit of prisoners’ and offenders’ families by representing the views of families and those who work with them and by promoting effective work with families…
A prison or community sentence damages family life.

NEPACS builds bridges between prisoners, families and communities that they will return to, they

believe that investment must be made in resettlement and rehabilitation to ensure that there are fewer crime victims in the future, and less prospect of family life being disrupted and possibly destroyed by a prison sentence… After all, the families haven’t committed the crime, but they, especially the children, are greatly affected by the punishment

Lizzie’s approach to working with people differs from typical academic studies. Rather than only surveying or asking questions of a community she collaborates with groups to create projects, workshops and events that are independently of value to that group, rather than just to fulfill research ends, she often works with artists, writers and performers to support partners and participants in articulating ideas.

The project partners and visitors contributed to booklets, postcards, conversations and a wall collage gathering experiences of the practical, technical and emotional issues people face. I brought together the stories, experiences and sketches, with a series of sketches I made, into a digitally printed textile hanging based on the idea of a patchwork quilt for the NEPACS Visitors’ Centre. Participants expressed a wish to produce a version that could hang in the Chapel and Action For Prisoners Families have versions which they will using for their training, education and work raising awareness of the hidden issues families face.

December 2, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Special Offer : bookleteer book sets

Our 5th special offer to raise funds for new projects and initiatives is an opportunity to buy three special sets of books made and published via bookleteer for our projects, City As Material, Material Conditions and Professor Starling’s Expedition.

December 2, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Special Offer #4 : RCA CRD RESEARCH books

Our fourth special offer to help raise funds for new projects and initiatives is from my personal archive of publications which I published whilst I was a member of the RCA’s Computer Related Design Research Studio. These were produced between 1999 and 2001 and include some rare copies of the original first edition of Tony Dunne’s classic, Hertzian Tales and the FLIRT book, a research project led by Fiona Raby.

The Presence Project by Bill Gaver, Ben Hooker et al (2001)

Biotica : Art, Emergence & Artificial Life by Richard Brown (2001)

The Flirt Book, by Fiona Raby et al (2000)

Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne (1999)

Technological Landscapes by Richard Rogers (1999)

Sorting through my archive, I found 11 copies of each which will be available per set for just £25 plus post & packing.

Our third festive offer to help raise funds for new project and initiatives is a set of publications we have collected together under the name Arts of Engagement. We have just 5 sets of these available, as some of the contents are now quite rare. It includes,

This year we’re offering some special offers to help raise funds for new projects and initiatives. The first offer is a limited number of packages (15 sets only) of some of our loveliest publications – including :

Tomorrow I start my journey to Papua New Guinea where I’m taking part in the Saem Majnep Memorial Symposium on Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK), hosted by the University of Goroka (Eastern Highlands Province) and supported by the Christensen Fund. The title and abstract of my talk at the symposium is:

Digital and Physical : simple solutions for documenting and sharing community knowledgeMy work is about engaging with people to identify things which they value – for instance knowledge, experiences, skills – and how they can share them with others in ways that are safe, appropriate and inspiring. As an artist and designer I have helped devise simple tools and techniques that can be adopted and adapted by people on their own terms – such as uses of everyday paper, cameras and printers alongside digital technologies such as the internet, archives and databases. I will demonstrate some examples of how these simple physical and digital tools can be used to share community knowledge in freely and easily accessible ways, so that they can also be re-worked and circulated in both paper and digital formats. I hope to offer some examples of how TEK in PNG might be widely documented and circulated as part of commonly available resources.

I wrote a piece about my initial thoughts on what I’ll be presenting and doing whilst I’m there on the bookleteer blog last month. My invitation to this event has been through James Leach, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen who will be there presenting his collaborative publication, Reite Plants, with Porer Nombo in whose village James has been doing fieldwork for 20 years. I first met Porer three years ago when he visited the UK to assist the British Museum’s Melanesia Project in identifying artefacts from the region where he lives in the Ethnographic Collection. At the time James had asked me to help him devise some new ways to document this kind of Traditional Knowledge Exchange that would capture something of the experience of all sharing knowledge that more institutional methods might miss. Consequently we used some Diffusion eNotebooks to capture and record our interactions as much as the stories and information that Porer and Pinbin shared about the artefacts. Alice and I also had the privilege of spending time with Porer and his fellow villager, Pinbin Sisau, inviting them to our home for an evening with James and his family and sharing with them some of the simple delights of central London life that people who don’t live here wouldn’t experience.

After the symposium James, Porer and myself will travel back to Porer’s village of Reite on the Rai Coast in Madang Province where we’ll stay for a week or so. There we’ll attempt to put some of our ideas into practice – I’ve designed some simple notebooks for us to use out in the bush, some printed on waterproof paper, others printed on standard papers. I’m very excited to have this unique opportunity to test out ideas I’ve had for using the Diffusion eBook format and bookleteer in the field for over 10 years now – harking back to conversations I had with anthropologist Genevieve Bell of Intel in 2003. I’m also very excited to have the privilege of visiting Porer and Pinbin in their home and meeting their families and community – joining the loop of one smaller circle of friendship and exchange and hopefully spiralling out into some larger ones that will continue into the future.

October 20, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Ending an era, beginning a new chapter

Its been 12 years since we published Performance Notations, the first series of Diffusion eBooks, and launched our unique publishing format on an unsuspecting world. In that time, we have commissioned and facilitated hundreds of original eBooks and StoryCubes by an incredibly diverse range of people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds. In that time we also began to evolve our own free and online software platform for people without professional design skills to be able to create their own eBooks and StoryCubes. Our first proof of concept prototype was made in the summer of 2003. We then spent a few years building a fully working version – the Diffusion Generator – which was online between 2006 and 2009. In September 2009 we launched bookleteer, a whole new set of ways for making and sharing eBooks and StoryCubes.

A New Place for Future eBooks & StoryCubes
This summer we made a series of technical changes to bookleteer that allow users to share their own publications directly with others via a Public Library. Each user has their own personal profile page listing all their shared publications (for instance, here’s mine) and each publication has its page listing both the downloadable PDFs and the bookreader online version (for example, see Material Conditions: Epilogue). We have further exciting developments in the pipeline too.

To continue our long tradition of commissioning and publishing new work, we have created a new Curated by Proboscis library which will, from now on, be where all new commissions and featured eBooks and StoryCubes will be listed. Our long-serving Diffusion Library website will remain online indefinitely as an archive of more than 12 years of pushing the boundaries of what we think of as publishing and creative practice.

As part of these changes we are also launching a new monthly publication – the Periodical – which will select, print and send out to subscribers some of the most exciting, experimental, imaginative and insipring eBooks created and shared on bookleteer. Anyone can take part – just sign up, make and share something on bookleteer. Each month we’ll pick one eBook to print and send out. We are also devising special projects, like Field Work, that will enable people to participate in other ways. And we are developing partnerships and collaborations to commission new series that will also be distributed as part of the Periodical’s monthly issues.

Publishing remains at the heart of Proboscis. We began 18 years ago with COIL journal of the moving image and followed this with many series of Diffusion eBooks. Since 1994, we have commissioned and published works by hundreds of different people in many formats.

Our latest publishing venture, the Periodical, aims to re-imagine publishing as public authoring – a phrase we’ve been using for over 10 years to describe the process by which people actively make and share what they value – knowledge, skills, experiences, observations – those things we characterise as Public Goods. Based on bookleteer, the Periodical is a way for people to participate in publishing as well as reading – in addition to receiving a printed eBook (sometimes more than just one) by post each month subscribers are encouraged to use bookleteer to make and share their own publications, which may then be chosen to be printed and posted out for a future issue.

Our first project being developed as part of this venture is Field Work : subscribers will be sent a custom eNotebook to use as a sketch and note book for a project of their own. Once they’ve filled it in they can return it to us to be digitised and shared on bookleteer. Several times a year we will select and print someone’s Field Work eNotebook to be sent out as part of a monthly issue of the Periodical.

Why are we doing this? We’ve long used the Diffusion eBook format to make custom notebooks for our projects and digitised them as part of our shareables concept. We think that such new possibilities of sharing our creative and research processes with others is a key strength of what these hybrid digital/physical technologies offer. Creating a vehicle, via the Periodical, for others to take part in an emergent and evolving conversation about how and why we do what we do seems like a natural step forward. If you’d like to take part, subscribe here.

September 18, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Lifecharm Shells Redux

Our collaborator at Philips R&D in Cambridge, David Walker, was generous enough to have some of the Lifecharm shells fabbed in a range of more exotic materials than our initial prototypes using Shapeways (a 3D printing firm spun-out of Royal Philips Electronics). The materials used range from metal/silver, ceramic and frosted and transparent glass.

Many thanks also to Dipak Mistry, our collaborator on Visualise Lifestreams at Arts & Business Cambridge who dropped them by the studio this morning.

August 27, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on bookleteer – a fresh look and new features

Last week we quietly updated bookleteer to give it a fresh look and to introduce the sharing features we announced previously. We’ve been tweaking and bug-fixing over the last week or so and are now very excited to let everyone know about it.

New Look Home & About Pages
We’ve refreshed both home and about pages to make it clearer what bookleteer is and what it can do.

Public Library Page
The new Library Page allows anyone browsing bookleteer to see what eBooks and StoryCubes have been created and shared by members.

Individual Publication Pages
Each publication that is shared publicly has a unique page created for it which can be linked to and shared via popular social media services (Twitter, Facebook etc). eBooks have an embedded version of the bookreader in the page for previewing as well as download links for the PDFs. StoryCubes also have preview images and download link.

Member Public Profile Page
A new public profile page has been created to list all the shared publications by each member, also displaying a short bio and links to personal blog, website, twitter and facebook pages. These can be added in the member’s account page.

These are just the first in a series of updates and improvements to bookleteer that we’re adding over the next few months – stay tuned for further announcements!

Its been over a year since we sent out our last newsletter – not that we haven’t been busy, in fact we’ve been absorbed in a whole range of projects and activities :

Storyweir at Exlab, Hive Beach, Dorset
We have been commissioned by Exlab to create a new project at Hive Beach, Dorset as part of the Cultural Olympiad. The work opens on Saturday 28th July and will remain on site until 9th September. We have 3 days of free talks and 2 nighttime events (projections with live cello) on Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th August – all welcome.http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/storyweir/

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This October sees the launch of our new monthly publication – each month we will crowdsource, print and post out an eBook to subscribers created and shared on http://bookleteer.com sharing the most beautiful, experimental, thought-provoking and inspirational eBooks people have created to inspire and provoke others into creating more of their own.SUBSCRIBE HERE : http://bookleteer.com/blog/2012/07/introducing-the-periodical/

We’ve also dropped the minimum print run for our Short Run printing service to just 25 copies per eBook and the prices for printing A6 eBooks have dropped between 30-50%. Check the prices with our estimator tool here:http://bookleteer.com/blog/ppod/

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Proboscis have been collaborating with Royal Holloway’s Information Security Group (as part of the their EPSRC/ESRC/TSB research project Vome – http://www.vome.org.uk) to work with a local community in Pallion, Sunderland to create a sustainable knowledge and support network for local people to help each other cope and deal with benefit changes. We have developed a set of simple tools and processes to assist this “Ideas Exchange” – co-designed with the local community and are helping them integrate and adopt them into their ways of getting things done.http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/pallion/

This Autumn we will be releasing a “Neighbourhood Ideas Exchange” package with versions of the tools that any community will be able to adopt and adapt for their own uses. Look out for announcements in September/October.

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Visualise Lifestreams
Proboscis has been commissioned by Futurecity and Arts&Business Cambridge to collaborate with Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise Public Art programme. We are exploring new forms for motivating people to incorporate health monitoring into their lifestyles by linking personal health data to systems that create tangible outputs. Starting with 3D printed ‘shells’ whose growth and shape is determined by data sets collected from ourselves, we plan to move on to feeding data to affect the growth of crystals and eventually towards ‘growing’ a shell organically through tissue engineering.http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/lifestreams/